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cry, and I would just be amazed, it was as though she was living through the whole thing.
    â€œI had no idea of slaves, but the way she was telling it made me feel very sad, not for the woman being beaten on the back, but for my great-grandmother. Each time, after she told that story, my grandmother Carrie would give her a peppermint to make her feel better.” (No matter how terrible the past, Elvira at least had family; many former slaves had lost all trace of relatives. The government cared for some of these old people in homes like the one called Blue Plains, near Washington, D.C.)
    Elvira had been born on a tobacco plantation in Holly Springs, Arkansas (when she died in 1936, the death certificate listed her as being “about ninety”), and Josephine would always be in conflict about her,partly proud, partly ashamed that her grandmother had been a slave. She sometimes claimed that Elvira was an Indian—hadn’t the red man been in America when the first white man came ashore? In fact, the tiny five-foot-tall woman may have been part Indian; she had long, straight, black hair.
    During the period that Josephine was mistress of the château Les Milandes, one of the men who worked for her told me she grew tobacco by the front door. She never revealed that the tobacco was a tribute to Elvira.
    Elvira grew up to marry a Virginian, an older man named Richard McDonald. They could not have children, and in 1886, in Little Rock, Arkansas, they adopted a baby, naming her for Richard’s sister, Caroline. (Caroline and her husband, Charles Crook—also a much older man—had had two children, but both died in infancy.) In time, the two couples and baby Carrie moved together from Little Rock to St. Louis.
    At the end of the nineteenth century (we know the family was there as early as 1896, because of Carrie’s school records), St. Louis was a rapidly growing city. In 1849, it had survived a cholera epidemic that killed four thousand people, and a waterfront fire that spread from burning steamboats to destroy hundreds of buildings in the narrow streets along the Mississippi. By 1874, the Eads Bridge had been built across the river, which meant the city could be reached by train from Cincinnati, rather than by ferry. The population of St. Louis was polyglot; the French settlers had been followed by Spaniards, Germans, Irish, and British. There was also, in the mid-1800s, an influx of blacks like the McDonalds and the Crooks from the rural South. By 1900, there were 575,238 people in the city, 35,516 of them black.
    Charles Crook had a government pension of fourteen dollars a month. He had been one of 186,017 black soldiers to join the Union army during the Civil War; he had fought with Company D of the Sixty-first United States Colored Infantry, and suffered a gunshot wound in his left hand. In St. Louis, he found a job as a porter in a store; his two incomes established him as head of the household. He, his wife, and the McDonalds shared a third-floor railroad flat in a row house at 1534 Gratiot Street. Richard McDonald worked as a laborer, Elvira worked as a laundress, and little Carrie was left at home in the care of Caroline Crook.
    When Carrie McDonald was seventeen years old, a conductor workingfor the St. Louis Transit Company—electric cars were replacing the old horse cars—was paid twenty-one cents an hour, and the city was playing host to a World’s Fair. The fair—technically the Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904—brought visitors from all over the globe, but did not treat them all equally. One restaurant on the exposition grounds posted a sign, NO COLORED PEOPLE SERVED , and the company with the fresh-water concession refused to set out water for blacks “even when they offered to drop a cent in the slot, as do white folks.”
    Slavery was long gone, but many people of color felt that true freedom came only to those with light skins. A member of the black